Actionable Tips for Video Advertising on Facebook

Do you have a business you would like to advertise on Facebook in order to generate more sales and you’ve been wondering how best to go about it?

If yes, then I bet you that this post will be very useful to you, because I’m about to show you practical tips you need to implement when using video advertising on Facebook. According to Infographic World, nearly 75% of all internet traffic in 2017 will be video.

Most times, what an article may not do for you, a video will do. This is where video marketing comes to play. Predictions are already on ground that Facebook will soon start thinking of monetizing video contents published on their platform using Facebook live. CEO of Pixalate, Jalal Nasir is of the opinion that one major sport company will sign exclusive distribution contract with Facebook this year.

It’s obvious however that the death of Vine will ultimately bring video advertising to a whole new level for entrepreneurs. This makes it a guarantee that if you are already doing well in communicating with your clients via video, you will likely land more business opportunities with it.

Ever since Facebook has added the auto-play option to the videos in the news feed, Facebook video advertising has become the most popular and the most effective way for promoting your brand. In the past, most marketers were sharing their videos on YouTube and embedding them into their Facebook timelines. This way, an embedded YouTube video link is displayed as an iframe thumbnail. Users could then play a video in the same iframe box, whenever they wanted.

Unlike YouTube links, hosted Facebook videos have an auto-play option. They are played automatically, while you are scrolling your news feed. This highly practical feature has won the hearts of many marketers. But even the videos with an auto-play mode need to be fresh, interesting, and engaging to win the hearts of the picky Facebook audience. In this article, we will share tips that will help you to make your videos go viral and improve your Facebook advertising.

Include Subtitles

Facebook videos need to have subtitles because most of them are played silent. Facebook users usually catch the first few video frames in the auto-play mode and then decide whether they are going to watch the video until the end. Even then, most Facebook users watch the videos in the mute mode because they often do it at work, or while being in a public place.

The First Few Seconds Are Crucial

We have thousands of video posts in our Facebook feeds every day, but we do not watch all of them. An average Facebook user needs only a few seconds to decide whether the video is worth watching until the end. That is why every video should make an impact in the first few seconds. So, forget about the standard video commercial timing and make the first few seconds engaging and brilliant.

Also, avoid adding any intro or displaying logos or credits at the beginning of the video. Jump straight to the most interesting part and use it to engage your audience. This is not always easy to accomplish, especially if you are not an expert in the field. Check out, for example, how video producers from the Alexander Thomas Media Company make their engaging videos. Go through their body of work and you will definitely get some ideas.

Facebook Videos Should Be Short

Would you watch a half an hour long video on your phone while being on the subway? You could miss your station and end up in an undesirable part of the city. Since most people browse their Facebook news feeds while waiting for something, the advertising videos need to be short and concise. Videos that are longer than 5 minutes should not be used in Facebook advertising. The most effective duration for commercial videos on Facebook is up to 1 minute.

Choose an Interesting Thumbnail

Though Facebook permit her users to deactivate autoplay of videos on their news feed but how many Facebook users have done so? They see Facebook videos as thumbnails with a play icon. To motivate these users to play your video, you will need to add an attractive thumbnail. If you do not do that, Facebook will randomly select the video frame and use it for the purpose. You can add a thumbnail by clicking on the “Custom Thumbnail” option when adding your video and creating an ad.

Although Facebook removed its 20% text limit for the photo and video ads, your thumbnail should not be covered with text because it will decrease the ad’s reach. When adding the thumbnail, use the 16:9 or 1:1 picture ratio because Facebook uses this ratio for displaying the video ads.

Target Mobile Devices that Are Connected to a Wi-fi

Most users browse their Facebook news feeds from their mobile phones. To save their mobile plan data, they often turn off the autoplay option while browsing. If you want to play the video to your audience, you can add a filter that plays the video only to the users whose devices are connected to a Wi-fi. Although this filter can decrease your ad’s daily reach, it will ensure that every viewer will see at least a part of your video.

Use Videos for Link and Carousel Ads

Videos have a very wide use in Facebook advertising. They can help you to promote websites by sharing links in the standard form or the form of carousel posts. Most advertisers use static images for these forms of Facebook ads. By using videos for this purpose, you can optimize them with headlines, link descriptions, and call-to-action buttons. One of these buttons is the ‘Shop Now,’ which helps marketers to bypass several shopping steps and increase their conversion rate.

Good-quality branded videos allow companies to tell their stories in a creative and a unique way. Facebook is currently the most popular social network in the world. It offers great audience targeting options. At the moment, this platform hosts more than 100 million hours of videos and this figure will dynamically grow in the next couple of years. Facebook video advertising will continue to rock the marketing analytic charts for many years to come.

Thanks for stopping over to drop your kind words with us. You are on point. Video advertising rocks. I bet you, any internet marketer not using it must be missing a whole lot. The exposure it brings to ones business is better experienced than imagine. People love watching videos.

Hi Oscar great article highlighting the importance of video marketing. Content in the form of video is the best way to position a brand among the audience. Cisco has already predicted that by 2018 70% online traffic will be coming from video.

In Facebook, it’s crucial that business should create compelling video snippets that can convey messages in short span. If the video is uploaded to a platform where the video won’t autoplay then we need to create thumbnails that send an alluring message.

“monetizing video contents published on their platform using Facebook live” Oh I can’t wait for that to happen, let’s see how this goes.
To me, the most interesting are the thumbnail and the emotional trigger on the video.
Great Post!
Thanks for sharing